Arizona develops surge line for load-balancing COVID-19 cases

The state’s many health systems put competitive concerns aside for the greater good during a pandemic, using IT to send patients to wherever could best serve them.

As Arizona began preparing for an anticipated surge of COVID-19 patients, the state realized that coordination between hospitals to balance patient loads and provide access to high-demand resources such as ventilators was only occurring among a few health systems in the Phoenix and Tucson areas.

This left out large portions of the state, especially in rural Northern communities – which include an Indian Health Services area – that would likely be inundated with COVID-19 patients. This scenario would have forced physicians and their teams in these areas to call numerous health systems in hopes of finding the right level of care for patients when they needed it most, which would not have been an ideal scenario.

Officials from the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) recognized that a statewide patient load-balancing system could ensure that no hospital would be overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients while others had empty beds – whether those hospitals were across town from each other or in distant parts of the state.

Ideally, the state wanted to create a statewide hub with one central hotline that any Arizona hospital could call to access the right level of care for patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19. To do this, technology also was needed that could provide real-time visibility into bed capacity and specialist and ventilator availability across the state’s 100-plus hospitals. This was a significant undertaking, given that a statewide hub like this had never been attempted before.

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